I don’t mean the typical “there’s a misunderstanding and hilarity ensues” type of thing but more specific gags. Two that I’ve seen recently and which prompted me to start this:
Someone gives a (hideous) portrait to someone and the recipient has to deal with it without hurting the giver’s feelings. Both King of Queens and The Big Bang Theory have both done that one.
There’s also the playing with a baby and accidentally smacking its head on something. Friends and Modern Family have featured bonked baby heads.
At the mention of old people having sex, the rest of the cast has to make vomit-suppression faces. Not really a plot element, just something that shows up regularly, and is never funny.
“Happy Days” and the original WKRP both featured Christmas episodes in which someone’s friends all brought trees, thinking that the someone – the Cunningham family and Jennifer, respectively – would have no tree.
I once tried submitting this to TV Tropes but nobody could think of other examples.
There was an episode of both Magnum PI and Airwolf where the main character had to go rescue a woman that was being held in a foreign country. Turned out the person “holding” her didn’t want her because she was a violent nutjob psycho hose beast. As soon as the rescued woman got back, she started fixating on Magnum/String to the point she was going to kill their current gfs.
In this case it’s more lazy producing, because both shows were produced by Donald Bellisario, who also wrote the episode(s).
More to the point of the OP, it seemed that every show needed to do their own version of It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol.
There was a time also where shows did episodes where the cast played a baseball game, and important insights or character growth came from the game. They were using baseball as a metaphor for life.
In the early days of TV, in a show called I Married Joan, Joan opened a package addressed to her husband, only to have an inflatable raft fill her living room. Carl Reiner liked the idea so much, he used it in The Dick Van Dyke Show, and gave the original IMJ writer a scriptwriter’s credit for it. Since an idea that’s good enough to use is good enough to use again and again, the raft came back in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati.
There was also shoving heaps of explosive down Bug’s rabbit hole and stomping on the last bundle to reveal all the dynamite under the floorboards. That was done two or three times.
Without even trying hard I can name three shows with a “baby born in an elevator” episode. There was Night Court, All in the Family, and Benson. There must be more.
Petsitting a parrot, and the parrot repeats something terrible (out of context) that the sitter says. I think i remember this from an Andy Griffith episode. I remember a parrot saying " I hate Andy", and Barney being stressed about it.
I’ve seen this many times, but the Andy Griffith is the only one i can recall offhand.
Many of these very specific tropes i have seen repeated in kids shows; the plots are often “borrowed” from older sitcoms.
There’s probably a name for the trope where the servant pretends to be the rich owner of a mansion while the real owners pretend to work for him because the servant has told his family he was the owner, now they are coming to visit, and the nice owners don’t want him to look bad in front of his family. They did this on the Addams Family with Lurch and I know I’ve seen others.
